Wintershall DEA/Suez Oil Company

Implementation and enforcement of environmental legislation means that produced water generated from this oil drilling field must now be cleaned of any pollutants before being discharged into the natural environment. Reduced oil prices means that drilling fields are now less profitable, so any wastewater treatment solution to clean the produced water must have an acceptable CAPEX and OPEX.

Produced water from oil drilling is extremely complex. It contains a lot of minerals and has consequently high TDS. A lot of heavy metals are present in the produced water. COD and BOD values can also be extremely high, with a lot of inert COD being present. Also there is a lot of oil and other chemicals and additives from the drilling process.

Material selection is extremely important because wastewater with a high TDS is extremely corrosive. Traditional produced water cleaning technologies are outdated and have an extremely high operation cost. These extremely high operational costs mean that the solutions are not cost-effective to implement and small and medium sized oil drilling sites.

Space is also a major consideration on these oil drilling sites. Major construction works can be complicated due to health and safety requirements, and fixed wastewater treatment plants are often not suitable they cannot be adjusted to deal with high variations flows and loads.

So to find cost-effective wastewater treatment solution, that can be manufactured off-site, will fit in a small space, and that has low operational costs is a major challenge for oil and gas companies around the world.

PPU Umwelttechnik as a leading company in the treatment of produced water from gas and oil drilling. We have developed specialist modular solutions specifically for cleaning this type of wastewater. All the modules are manufactured with specific materials that were not corrode, and the plug and play modules can be combined to deal with any flow of produced water and any concentration of pollutants and produced water.

The modules are completely containerised. Equipment is pre-installed in the ISO container modules at a factory in Bavaria. Each module undergoes factory acceptance test prior to dispatch. We combine different process technology modules to achieve any desired cleaning levels.

For this specific oil drilling project the solution comprises physical pre-treatment, physical and chemical treatment by a specialist dissolved air flotation modules, advanced oxidation using diamond coated electrodes, advanced biological treatment using FBBR process technology and ultrafiltration.

The containerised solution can be stacked where necessary to fit into any desired space. The system is manufactured completely off-site. The only site work required is a platform for placement of containers, and all Lincoln points and pipework.

The system operates automatically with minimal user input required part from basic maintenance checks. Expansion of the system is simple with the addition of additional container modules.